Skits with science send Kitsap students to state competition

Destination Imagination competition combines art, engineering

SILVERDALE — School was out Saturday, but a lot of kids were in Silverdale solving problems.

Klahowya Secondary School hosted this year’s Olympic Peninsular Regional Tournament of Destination Imagination, a one-day event giving school students an opportunity to show off their scientific and artistic chops. Students from throughout Kitsap County, Belfair and other parts of the peninsula put months of practice to the test in displays that lasted less than 10 minutes.

For Chad Gorman, a Central Kitsap High School junior, it’s an opportunity to “be weird in front of an audience.”

Gorman is part of the Phanny Paks, a group of CK High students that has performed together in its current form for three years in the science category, including trips to the national competition in Knoxville, Tenn. Four of the team’s members have been working together nine straight years and have been to nationals three times.

The overall program challenges school-aged children to create solutions out of unique circumstances. In the gym, groups competed in a competition that combined a skit with building a structure that could take a hit while students added weights as much as 45 pounds at a time. In Klahowya’s auditorium students performed skits with characters morphing and wearing disguises, all the while not saying a single word.

Audra Hanson is mom to Klahowya eight-grader Danielle Harding, whose group performed a skit in which kids from the next millennium travel in time to our era to save the world from an evildoer bent on destroying it. Hanson is a volunteer who manages the team.

Adults give rides, provide the homes for practice session and teach the students skills, such as using a screwdriver. But the children themselves apply those skills to build sets, to figure out plots and skit conclusions and to tell a good story. “There is no adult intervention,” said Marcia Rubenstein, Olympic Region co-director for the competition.

Hanson said her daughter’s team met about once a week since the school year began to prepare for Saturday’s challenge. Not intervening can be the challenge for the adult volunteers, she said. “You see that there is an easier way to get from A to Z.”

But students do get to Z on their own and watching the process is a reward of its own for the adult volunteers. “It’s so much fun to see their creative process and what they come up with,” Hanson said.

Bruce Richards, a CK school board member, said he has been volunteering for about 25 years. The retired nuclear engineer said when he first formed managed a group he relied on boys skilled at science. That didn’t net him the results he anticipated in the structural challenge, which requires scientific mettle and performance ability. “They were great at building structures but they were terrible at skits,” Richards said.

A team from Silver Ridge Elementary School known as “The Bacon Boppers,” on the other hand, combined cardboard, duct tape and bamboo to perform a skit in which dinosaurs and humans avoided extinction and to place close to 150 pounds on top of a 7-inch structure made from the same three materials. Like other groups throughout Klahowya on Saturday, after the performance the Bacon Boppers answered questions from about a half-dozen volunteer judges.

Later in the afternoon the Phanny Paks gave their performance presenting an art piece that could fly on the wind. Rubenstein said it was the group’s best performance ever, going back to the original group’s first performance when three of them were second graders.

The Phanny Paks and other winners take their skills to Wenatchee on April 6 for the state competition. The winners from that will go to Knoxville in May for what team member Karli Holdren described as “the best five days of the year.”

Keeping the program funded has been a challenge, Richards said. The state used to provide money annually to support the organization’s budget, but with shifting economic tides it has been tough to get the state to designate the about $55,000 annually he believes it would take to help pay for the statewide event. Volunteers and other local groups have been “pretty creative” in the past few years in picking up the funding slack.

The skills earned come in multiples, Rubenstein said. She said she has seen some students overcome shyness by employing the performance aspect. They learn teamwork over the long haul and on the quick in impromptu settings. And the students learn to work creatively. All the skills, Rubenstein said, are skills that will pay dividends over a lifetime.